Previous letters pages can be found here.
Letters page from Volume 3, issue 25.
December 7th – 20th, 1955.
OUR
LETTER PAGE
A letter from Helen Barker, Sheffield 4.
Dear Enid Blyton,
I am sending you herewith a postal order value £1. I have recently had my long plaits cut off, and Mummy sent the hair to a wig maker’s. In payment for this we have received 14s., which I would like you to have for the babies in your Sunshine Home, also 6s. which I collected from my stamp swops.
Yours sincerely,
Helen Barker
(Sunbeam).
(Yours is such a nice letter, Helen, and I was so interested to hear about your hair, that I have chosen you for the letter-prize today.)
A letter from Wendy Naude, East London, Cape Province.
Dear Enid Blyton,
We have got a very black crow and a black spaniel, and they are so attached to one another that they are almost inseparable. One day while wandering about the garden they came on an old hen with small chicks. The hen immediately flew at the crow, and as soon as the dog saw that his friend was in danger he intervened and chased away the hen. It was really wonderful to see how faithful they are to each other.
Love from
Wendy Naude.
(A very interesting letter, Wendy. I wonder if any other of our readers know of unusual friendships between animals or birds.)
A letter from David Geddis, Lurgan.
Dear Enid Blyton,
This is my first letter. Yesterday, when I was coming home from school, I saw a budgie flying over my head. Then I shouted to my friend Cecil and between us we caught it. Then we met a woman looking for a budgie. She gave me 1s. for finding it. So I put it into my money-box and am saving it up to send to you.
David Geddis.
(A very good letter, David – and an interesting little story. What a good thing you found the budgie!)
I still haven’t worked out why some letters have a number at the end of the location. Occasionally the children include an age, but it would then say 4 years old. Is it part of their house number or post code included by mistake?
Anyway, 4 years old or otherwise Helen wins the prize for her hair-raising fund-raising letter.
At first glance I thought Wendy’s letter came from London, but of course it has come a lot further than that. East London is in South Africa. At first the animals put me in mind of Nosey the jackdaw and Snippet the dog – but they don’t get on quite as well as that!
Well done to David and Cecil for catching a budgie – as it’s really not that easy!
Fiona
pippastef
worldofblyton
World of Blyton 
It looks like major cities had early postcodes from 1935 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdom ~Norman
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I actually failed to consider the existence (or not) of postcodes at the time, or the format they might have taken.
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Thanks, Fiona, I always enjoy the posts about Letters, and the blog generally. Thanks so much for keeping it going. I read every post.
On the number after a location (in this case “Sheffield 4”), it is a kind of post code, but from before the precise post code system that we have now. So, in cities which were large enough, they were divided into districts. Later these became the basis of modern post codes, so Sheffield 4 is now S4 and someone’s post code might be S4 xyz
I don’t know when it started in Sheffield, but in Manchester it was in the 1860s.
You still occasionally hear the old district designations used as a shorthand for areas of a city. Liverpool 8 to denote Toxteth is probably the best-known example.
Chris
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Thank you for the kind words, and for the explanation. Never heard of Liverpool 8, but you learn something new every day! I’m now wondering what postal districts (if any) my city had before post codes were introduced.
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